Ryan McGinley Captures the Unprecedented Power of NYC Pride

One day before the ceremony to designate the Stonewall Inn a national monument, two weeks after Orlando, 46 years after a straggly band of New Yorkers gathered on Waverly Place for the very first Gay Pride march, an estimated million and a half marchers took to Fifth Avenue.

A 15-year-old transgender TV star, a Syrian refugee, and the owner of a nightclub in Florida were among those leading the parade. Politicians and churches, banks and drag bars, gun control activists and S&M enthusiasts, a joyous amalgam of the bourgeois and the badass danced from a seemingly endless array of floats—the parade lasted an unprecedented eight hours. The NYPD Marching Band played “Y.M.C.A.”; an FDNY EMT proposed to her girlfriend (she said yes); babies in carriages, who will never know of a time when being LGBT was reviled and gay marriage was inconceivable, waved tiny rainbow flags.

The celebrated photographer Ryan McGinley, born eight years after the rage and resistance that ignited the Stonewall rebellion, documented the day for Vogue.com—an indelible tribute to pride and power.